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Carson McCullers

News about Carson McCullers, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. More

All of Carson McCullers's fiction, from "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" (1940) through "The Member of the Wedding" (1946), "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" (1951) and "Clock Without Hands" (1961), is concerned, at heart, with a single theme: the loneliness of isolated individuals and their painful yearning to connect. McCullers's compassion for her disenfranchised characters -- an awkward teenage girl, a deaf-mute, a crossed-eyed recluse -- had roots in her own short, painful life. Rheumatic fever and a series of strokes left her a virtual invalid in her early 30's, and her two marriages to Reeves McCullers, a failed writer who shared her taste for alcohol, would devolve into spectacular acrimony and dysfunction.

What Miss McCullers's heroes hunger for most of all is love, which has the power to heal and redeem. Love for them is something incalculable and wild, frequently bearing little relationship to the nature of the beloved. It tends to arrive unexpectedly and violently, but it also tends to skitter away just as precipitously, leaving them hurt, damaged and often bitter. Michiko Kakutani